Born in Como, Milanese by adoption, Vania Elettra Tam is one of the artistic fruits of the New Academy of Fine Arts of Milan and the School of Graphic Design Castello Sforzesco.

The irony and the seduction of his scripts are superimposed on a veiled social criticism, but with an ever slight, funny and surreal looking.

The home, delicacy, and the instability of their everyday microcosms, have made her known and appreciated in Italy and abroad, where she has exhibited in cities like Prague, London, Miami and San Diego, and Cuba.

A Pop painting, with a clear illustrative ancestry, is Vania Elettra Tam's, which uses the self-portrait as a pretext leitmotiv to investigate tics and obsessions of contemporary femininity. The artist portrays her alter ego involved in mundane daily activities, such as makeup, bathing or cooking, casting fantastic shadows on the walls of the home that do not match the gestures and movements of the protagonists.

Vania Elettra Tam constructs a narrative irony, which runs parallel to the events described in the foreground as a visual hypertext. Hers is, therefore, a representation that combines realistic mimicry and fantastic transfiguration, spreading images of circumstantial detail, suggesting a key of interpretation. This is the case of the work "Crocodile Tears," where, beside the figure of the protagonist, appears as a small piece of paper with the Fibonacci sequence, a mathematical model used to describe the rates of growth and reproduction of natural resources ... "

Computers, television, mobile phone, satellite navigation and all the comfy technological objects offer numerous advantages, but also lead to isolation, making each individual a prisoner of fashion.

Vania Elettra Tam worked, like many contemporary artists, with the help of the digital camera to create scenes inside the house, organizing the objects and lights like a film set, where the script, direction and acting are entrusted to one person: herself.

"I want to represent the loneliness, how could I do it with the help of another?"

After selecting the image and decided how to cut, the work is drawn in charcoal on the canvas and then painted with oils.

In this series the black prevails because the artist wants to represent nightlife fragments, describing the insomnia caused by alienation and emphasizing, through patches of light, the loneliness of contemporary life.

«The works show a photographic cut well balanced: women are framed on the right side of the image, projecting their silhouettes accompany them on the left side and the world of dreams is situated around, going beyond the limits the canvas and dragging wuth the grip of his reverie at the same viewer.

In these paintings Vania style seems to recede Alex Katz[check out at the end of this post], who was the most addressed in her early work; plain background, pastel colors, becomes the direct relationship between the real world and the dream. Forms, in fact, prove to be more consistent, defined by dusty brushstrokes. The use of bright colors improves the condition of uncertainty and the presence of black, more crucial accompanying each woman represented, referred back to the dark side with which each should be measured.

It is unavoidable to think in the suggestive atmospheres of Edward Hopper; Vania takes from him the peculiarity of immortalizing the moment in which the more introspective sense of the scene is revealed, but also reveals the uniqueness of her research. The movements are actually imbued of real dynamism and what is most striking are the strong and emphatic expressions of the faces caricatured; inspiration that must be founded in the illustrations of Norman Rockwell and Walter Molino[check out at the end of this post]. Vania is fascinated by these artists.»

Text by Laura Angelone

"SOSpesa 3", óleo sobre lienzo / oil on canvas, 100 x 80 cm., 2011

Se puede disfrutar de la obra de Vania en / You can enjoy Vania's work in:

Alex Katz is an American figurative artist born in 1927. In particular, he is known for his paintings, sculptures, and prints and is represented by numerous galleries internationally.

From 1946 to 1949 Katz studied at The Cooper Union in New York, and from 1949 to 1950 he studied at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Skowhegan, Maine. Skowhegan exposed him to painting from life, which would prove pivotal in his development as a painter and remains a staple of his practices today. Katz explains that Skowhegan’s plein air painting gave him “a reason to devote my life to painting."

Katz achieved great public prominence in the 1980s. He is well known for his large paintings, whose bold simplicity and heightened colours are now seen as precursors to Pop Art.

His paintings are defined by their flatness of colour and form, their economy of line, and their cool but seductive emotional detachment.[13] A key source of inspiration is the woodcuts produced by Japanese artist Kitagawa Utamaro.

The festival of San Remo. Around Mina, number one on the show, Walter Molino presents some of the "singers". They are (left to right) Gino Paoli, Giorgio Gaber (guitar), Tony Renis, Gianni Meccia, Umberto Bindi (blue jersey) and Adriano Celentano.

The "heroes" of the Giro. The maximum and most popular Italian cycling race, which draws on its way to nearly four thousand kilometers huge enthusiastic crowds, sees the struggle of the strongest champions from Italy and abroad. In the foreground, Coppi and Bartali great rivals. Behind, from left to right, Bevilaqua, Kubler, Magni and Robic.

Walter Molino was an Italian illustrator born in 1915.

At fifteen, Molino published his first sketches. Noted by Benito Mussolini, is called to make cartoons in the newspaper Il Popolo d'Italia, the organ of the National Fascist Party. In 1935 he made ​​ his debut on the popular weeklies of the Publishing House Universe.

In 1937, he collaborated with the Argentovivo! newspaper edited by Enrico De Seta, drawing various cartoons.

Contributes with Bertoldo (1936/1943) and Marcus Aurelius (1931/1973), both satirical newspapers in which he is known for his quite provocative figures of girls. In the late thirties is dedicated to adventure comics.

Since January 1941, replaces the painter Achille Beltrame in the design of the covers for the magazine Domenica del Corriere, would continue doing for thirty years. Among the most famous one on the birth of television (1954), the champion cyclist Fausto Coppi (1960), and the Russians in space (1965).

Alessandro di Mariano di Vanni Filipepi, better known as Sandro Botticelli, was an Italian painter of the Early Renaissance born c.1445. He belonged to the Florentine School under the patronage of Lorenzo de' Medici, a movement that Giorgio Vasari would characterize less than a hundred years later as a "golden age", a thought, suitably enough, he expressed at the head of his Vita of Botticelli. Botticelli's posthumous reputation suffered until the late 19th century; since then his work has been seen to represent the linear grace of Early Renaissance painting. Among his best known works are The Birth of Venus and Primavera.

He died in 1510.

Botticelli was commissioned to paint the work by the Medici family of Florence, specifically Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco de' Medici under the influence of his cousin Lorenzo de' Medici, close friend to Botticelli. It depicts the goddess Venus, having emerged from the sea as an adult woman, arriving at the sea-shore (which is related to the Venus Anadyomene motif).

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